Artist Scott Cohen originally envisioned the Life Cube Project as a creative way to bring people together and encourage them to write down and reach for their goals, dreams, and aspirations. Through interactive installations at the Burning Man festival and collaborative civic art installations around the world, thousands of participants have touched, inscribed, painted on, and added their personal visions to the Life Cube, with even more posting and following the project on social media.

Since Scott first conceived of the Life Cube in 2010, the project has become larger in scope, more aesthetic, and increasingly interactive. Throughout, his mission has been the same: to encourage people to write down what they want to accomplish in life, and to connect art and community involving as many people as possible. This is NOT “I built this, come and see it” but rather, “Come and be a part of the art!” 

Three Life Cube installations were presented at Burning Man before Scott was awarded an Honorarium Artist grant to return the Life Cube to Burning Man in 2015. Additional Life Cube projects have been developed for civic arts festivals, for rural areas lacking arts enrichment, and for communities facing social and economic challenges. Projects range in size and scale from smaller structures, to a twelve-foot metal Life Cube sculpture, to a 24-foot high wood-framed mega-Life Cube with a bigger footprint. 

The larger Life Cube installations have culminated in exhilarating closing ceremonies where all the goals and dreams of the community are released in an enormous bonfire complete with pyrotechnics, consigning all the art, the community’s written goals and dreams, and the entire structure to the flames. Whatever its form, the Life Cube Project is ephemeral, radically inclusive and non-commercial. Hundreds of artists and volunteers have joined Scott in planning and executing each project. And over a thousand individual donors have supported the Life Cube, with other funding provided by grants, foundations and local underwriting.

The Life Cube’s social outreach program has traveled to a hundred schools and provided free art materials for 50,000 children, conducting talks and workshops on art, community and goal setting. As its founding artist, Scott has spoken to folks in shelters, rehab centers and university students on these topics as well. As of 2022, over 100,000 people have participated in or interacted with the Life Cube in communities across the country, including Reno, Mason Valley and Las Vegas, Nevada, El Paso, Texas, the Bronx, New York, and Miami Beach, Florida, among others. The most recent Life Cube was constructed and burned outside Lviv, Ukraine, providing a cathartic release of dozens of refugees’ written goals and dreams. Each installation activates its space and becomes a center of creativity. With over twenty-five thousand followers on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, the project is an attention magnet and lends itself to sharing on social media.

After creating online versions of the Life Cube Project for Virtual Burning Man in 2020, Scott was asked to help inspire disengaged students and teachers during the pandemic. He spoke to hundreds of students over Zoom, provided lesson plans and free art materials, and developed a means of displaying a thousand posted images created by the students as a single piece of collaborative, interactive digital art. He and his team are currently identifying opportunities to create future Life Cube installations connecting art and community. A long time resident of New York, Scott now lives in Easton, Maryland with his wife Madeleine and their two dogs, Scruffy and Casey.